The present invention relates to a technique of recognizing speech data such as communication speech data input from a mobile (portable) terminal and generating an E-mail document or a FAX document, i.e., text data formatted on the basis of the recognition result and, more particularly, to a technique of transmitting the generated document.
A speech recognition technique of recognizing a speech signal, converting the speech signal into character data, and storing the character data or using the recognition result for various services is conventionally demanded in various industrial fields.
In recent years, along with the advance of the speech recognition algorithm, speech recognition systems using main frame computers or workstation computers have been developed.
These systems, such as by a bank balance inquiry system for receiving telephone speech data, a seat reservation system, and a goods sorting system for automatically delivering goods upon recognizing the operator voice, are being introduced to various industrial fields.
However, such speech recognition systems have just reached a practical recognition accuracy in the environment of the above-described large-scale computer system. In the environment of a small computer system such as a personal computer, no inexpensive speech recognition systems having a practical recognition accuracy has been realized yet.
Together with the above-described information processing technology, mobile terminals including such as mobile phones, portable telephones, and PHSs (Personal Handyphone Systems) are rapidly becoming popular.
In particular, the PHS is compact and more inexpensive with respect to telephone charges than a mobile phone or portable telephone, and it is explosively being popularized because of its characteristic feature, i.e., the capability of high-quality communication "with anybody anytime anywhere". In addition, the PHS uses a public network having an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) as a backbone and therefore allows high-speed digital communication at a transfer rate of 32 kbits/sec, so that future applications to multimedia communication fields are also increasingly expected.
The PHS is also expected as a multimedia information management/communication terminal which can be used not only as a portable telephone but also as a portable information management device while exploiting the convenience of the mobile terminal. More specifically, such a mobile terminal is expected to have a home page access function and an E-mail communication function as functions of accessing the Internet or an intra-office network as well as a speech communication/FAX function. An information management function such as address management, schedule management, memo management, or database searching is also expected to be arranged.
Such a mobile terminal is required to have a user interface as user-friendly and natural as possible such that the user can readily use it. User interfaces currently put into practice include finger operation input from a keyboard or a mouse and handwriting input using an electronic pen. It is ideal that the user interface can also cope with speech input or the like. More specifically, when not only address input, schedule input, and memo input but also E-mail generation/transmission and FAX generation/transmission are enabled using a speech signal representing the speech contents as data while using the speech communication function as the basic function, the convenience of the mobile terminal can be largely increased. This is the advantage of the application of the speech recognition function as a user interface to the mobile terminal.
However, the mobile terminal is compact and has only a limited information processing capability. In addition, in current speech recognition processing, the practical recognition accuracy can be realized only in the environment of a main frame computer or workstation computer. Therefore, the speech recognition function as the user interface of a mobile terminal has not yet been realized.